Friday, 11 May 2012

The HTC Desire C, previously known as Wildfire C or Golf, leaks once again in live pictures.

This time it was spotted on the Orange Romania Facebook page. Someone there apparently decided to take pictures from the Marketing’s team office and post them on Facebook. The HTC Desire C can be found in two of those pictures.

After the Galaxy S III announcement many people, including us, were wondering why Samsung decided to use a PenTile Super AMOLED screen instead of an Super AMOLED Plus unit.

Well, a Samsung spokesman has explained why. The reason turned out to be plain simple – it’s not because Samsung can’t satisfy the demand – it’s just that the PenTile will last longer.

As it turns out, the RGB AMOLEDs degrade much faster than the PenTile AMOLEDs so the picture quality becomes worse faster. The blue pixels are the ones to blame – they degrade faster than the red and green pixels

Late last year, LG made some waves as being one of the few manufacturers to publicly release a detailed list regarding updates to the latest Android version. This is a good idea if you want to show your customers that you're serious about future-proofing your smartphones, but is not so good if you can't stick to your schedule, which is what appears to have happened with the Optimus 2X.

Samsung has just announced the I8350 Omnia M smartphone running on Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh. Oddly, the handset has the same model number as the I8350 Omnia W, but comes with different specs.

The Super AMOLED screen on the Omnia M has grown to 4 inches instead of the 3.7 inches on the Omnia W, but the rest of the specs are somewhat dumbed down. There's 384MB RAM instead of 512MB and 4GB of internal storage instead of 8GB.

Recently, we heard that Nokia will be launching the Nokia 808 PureView in Mexico. This was after the company publicly announced that it won't be selling Symbian and S40 phones in North America any more and also excluding the continent from the 808 PureView list of launch countries.

It has been widely speculated that the North American version of the new Samsung flagship, the Galaxy S III, would run on the Snapdragon S4 chipset rather than the Exynos 4 Quad found in the international version. This is largely due to the LTE support, which will be enabled on the North American version of the smartphone.

An ad from Canadian carrier Rogers however would have you believe otherwise as a recently spotted banner indicates that the phone would have an Exynos chip inside, alongside 4G LTE support.

Thursday, 10 May 2012

Photo of an LTE-enabled Samsung droid, called SPH-L300 leaked along with some basic specifications. Its model number suggests that the handset is headed to Sprint in the US, but there's no info on a possible release date.

A leaked photo of the Samsung SPH-L300

The design of the phone is quite interesting - the faux-metal border and embossed hardware keys look closer to what you would expect from HTC and not Samsung.

We first heard about HTC Golf back in March, thanks to a leaked camera sample. Then we saw a believable enough official render and we heard the phone would be called Wildfire C.

What we got today is the first live pictures of the device. It looks just like in those rendered images, but packs a different paintjob. Also, the image source claims, the smartphone will be called Desire C instead of Wildfire C though it certainly looks more like previous Wildfires than Desires.

Wednesday, 9 May 2012

Yesterday the Sony LT29i Hayabusa leaked in a blurry shot. Shortly after that the official announcementcame.

Sony ST26i

Today we have another Sony leak for you as the first images of the Sony ST26i surfaced.

Obviously it’s an Xperia smartphone running on Android, but that's about as much as we can tell you about the specs. Unlike the Japan-bound duo unveiled earlier, though, this one keeps the capacitive keys instead of relying on on-screen buttons. Let’s hope the ST26i won’t be released with Gingerbread as the Xperia S and its smaller siblings.

A few weeks ago RIM launched the cheap Curve 9220 in India. Today it announced the Curve 9320, which is pretty much the same phone, but with a few additional extras.

The Curve 9320 packs a 2.44 non-touch QVGA display, a four-row QWERTY keyboard, a 3 megapixel snapper with LED flash (in contrast to the 2MP in the Curve 9220), 512MB RAM and 512MB ROM, FM radio and microSD card slot.

Sony Mobile just announced two new LTE-capable Android smartphones for Japan. The Sony Xperia GX is the more interesting part of the duo as it combines the specs of an Xperia ion with a 13MP camera. The Sony Xperia SX is no slouch either - at 95g, Sony claims it to be the lightest LTE-enabled phone.

The Sony Xperia GX is the Sony LT29i Hayabusa that has leaked a few times (including some blurry shots of the device yesterday) and it probably uses Sony's new 13MP sensor.

Nokia has just overruled its plans to exclude North America from the PureView 808 markets. Mexico is getting the camera/smart phone hybrid in a few weeks, probably in the end of May or the beginning of June.

The confirmation comes straight from the Spanish version of Nokia Conversations

Kyocera (who you might remember from the dual-screened Echo) has come up with a pair of tough Androids - the Hydro and the Rise. Both are CDMA phones and run Google's latest, Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Kyocera Hydro is a standard slab measuring 115 x 62 x 12.8 mm and weighing 120g. It has a 3.5" HVGA IPS LCD screen, a 1GHz processor (Qualcomm MSM8655 Snapdragon chipset) with 512MB of RAM, a 3.2MP camera, a 1,500mAh battery and a 2GB microSD card in the box (plus 2GB of built-in storage).

Sony’s LT29i codenamed Hayabusa just can’t wait for its official announcement. Its first leak was back in January - targeted launch and price. Then in April we got some leaked camera shots taken with the Hayabusa.

Today we finally got to see what the smartphone will look like thanks to a blurry cam photo. It’s really bad and you can see almost no hardware details, but one thing is sure – this is not Sony smartphone we've seen before.

We have been hearing about Tizen for quite a while now but The Handheld Blog has gotten some hands-on time with a developer unit running the OS.

At first glance Tizen looks quite familiar to the TouchWiz implementation on Android but there are enough difference to set the two apart considerably. The apps seem to be placed directly on the homescreen like on iOS instead of a dedicated application drawer on Android.